In a mobile communication system, a user equipment (UE) attached to the network may be in two states: connected state and idle state. When the user equipment is in the connected state, user plane data packets can be transmitted directly between the user equipment and the network side. When the user equipment is in the idle state, the network side releases resources allocated to the user equipment. If the network side needs to send data packets to a user equipment in the idle state, the network side pages the user equipment and triggers the user equipment to initiate a service request procedure to restore the signaling connection and user plane bearers between the network side and the user equipment.
When a serving gateway (SGW) on the network side receives a downlink data packet for the user equipment, if the serving gateway finds that the downlink tunnel is invalid, the serving gateway buffers the data packet and sends a downlink data notification message to a mobility management network element. The downlink data notification message is generally used to indicate the mobility management network element to restore the radio access bearer of a user equipment. If the user equipment is in the idle state, where the signaling connection between the user equipment and the network is released, the mobility management network element pages the user equipment, so that the user equipment initiates a service request procedure according to the paging to restore the signaling connection with the network side and the radio access bearers of the user plane bearers on the air interface side. Then, the SGW sends the buffered data packet to the UE.
During the research and practice of the method, the inventor of the present invention finds that the prior art has the following problems:
In the prior art, the downlink data notification message, which is sent by the serving gateway to the mobility management network element, includes only a tunnel endpoint ID (TEID) allocated by the mobility management network element to the serving gateway; the mobility management network element can locate the called user equipment according to the TEID to page the user equipment, but the mobility management network element cannot differentiate the service attribute of the user equipment. For example, the mobility management network element cannot differentiate which type of service of the user equipment has triggered the paging. As a result, the mobility management network element cannot perform differentiated processing on the paging, but follow a uniform principle, thus deteriorating the quality of service provided to the subscriber.